Another Mafi's Tale
Julie Steimle
A Hallowedspell Novella
Copyright © 2014 by Julie Steimle. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the context of reviews
The characters, events, and locations portrayed in this book are entirely fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Freaky School
Keenan couldn’t stop shaking.
Key witness. Those two words defined his future, set it in tight walls where there was no way to go but straight ahead. But the court date was month away, and even after the trial they would hunt for him. After all, an offense against the ‘family’ was a death sentence.
Why did he have such rotten luck?
Dad in prison.
Mom run off with some loser drug addict.
Living with cousins was all he had, and they preferred to hang with the gangs. All he wanted was a life, a future. And that was what the police told him he could find at Gulinger Private Academy. That and freaks.
“I really don’t like sending normal kids to that place,” one of the policemen driving him there said to his partner, glancing once at Keenan through the plastic, barred partition that divided the front of the car from the prisoner seats in the back.
His partner chuckled. “It’s that or foster care in Idaho, and we can’t afford to send this kid so far off. He needs to be close for the trial. ”
Foster care. Keenan hated that phrase. He had been in and out of foster homes until his aunt finally decided to take him in. She was only slightly more inclined to keep him after he threw himself into his studies. His cousins called him a brownnoser. This school would keep him out of that situation. This school, the FBI had said, would provide all the education he wanted, and protection. But when the local police snorted at hearing the school’s name, Keenan wondered if he was falling into some kind of trap…a feeling he had again when they arrived on the curb.
The school didn’t look like anything more than an apartment building. There was no sign in sight. No schoolyard either. But then it was night, and hard to see.
“Here we are,” one of the policemen said, he didn’t know which. Keenan was too exhausted to care.
They came out, opened the back door for him, and led Keenan up the steps to the main doors, ringing the bell for apartment 5G—a Mr. Wilderman.
<<Hello?>> a voice on the intercom replied, sounding a tinge miffed at being interrupted.
“Hi, it’s Officers Clay and Ulrich with the kid we called about.”
Keenan frowned. They only ever called him ‘the kid’. Derogatory. One day he would be the boss of himself. One day men would show him respect. That one day was still a few years off—he had to go to college first—but he was going to make people respect him.
The front door unlocked.
<<Enter.>>
The policemen pushed it open.
Standing inside the front hallway next to the letterboxes and a ratty neighborhood bulletin board was a tall, owl-eyed sort of man. He tilted his head almost as if he would rotate it all the way around, examining them, though he didn’t do more than nod to the police, glancing once at Keenan.
“Go straight through. Second floor is the headmaster’s office,” the man said.
Keenan stared, his eyes catching on a birdish twitch of the night guard’s shoulders, the man smirking with a step into the shadows. The man vanished in the dark with a flutter of what sounded like wings.
“Come on,” Officer Clay said, waving with his arm for Keenan to follow.
They walked even-paced into a better lit part of the hall, turning a corner where there stood on worn linoleum a cluster of boys in dark blue pants, white shirts, with blue ties loosely hanging around their necks, the Gulinger insignia royally stitched on their front pockets. They looked up at the sight of two police officers, but their gaze settled on Keenan next, and they huddled down together again in whispers. Keenan overheard them say as he passed by to the stairs, “What do you think? Mafi or ghoulie?”
What was that?
Keenan shuddered.
The stairwell had a fair amount of traffic. The moment he stepped into it, boys and girls of all ages and dispositions, ascended and descended past them. Downstairs where several were going and leaving, he heard the plastic clinking, chair scraping clamor of a cafeteria. Upstairs had the bustle of a school hallway, feet walking here and there with daily chatter. He marched up the stairs, watching the boys and girls in uniform pass by, all of them staring at him while whispering the same question—was he a mafi or a ghoulie?
The police led him into the hall on the second floor. On both sides of the hallway were doors into multipurpose rooms, classrooms, and a study hall. In one room, kids were watching that western—Silverado—though in another room there were kids playing foosball and ping pong. He saw marching out of one room a fantastically dressed girl who was built to stroll down fashion catwalks, her scarlet dress glittering along with her shiny lip gloss. Two steps behind her, almost growling with a scowl on his face, a boy about fourteen with a thick head of dark golden retriever-like colored hair and practically chop-like sideburns argued as loud as he could stand.
“I told you! Not
Impressum
Verlag: BookRix GmbH & Co. KG
Tag der Veröffentlichung: 23.07.2014
ISBN: 978-3-7368-2716-5
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